Two research groups were
discussed in previous posts.
Csikszentmihaly and Hunter
concluded that:
Teenagers ascribe happiness to their moods when they
are in situations of relative freedom, in the company of age-mates, able to
engage in flow activities that stretch their skills and makes them feel alive
and proud. [1]
The MIT study under the
leadership of Alex Pentland concluded that successful collaboration includes:
1. Large number of ideas: many short contributions
rather than a few long ones;
2. Dense interactions: a continuous, overlapping
cycling between making contributions and very short (less than one second)
responsive comments (such as “good,” “that's right,” “what?” etc.) that serve
to validate or invalidate the ideas and build consensus; and
3. Diversity of ideas: everyone within a group contributing
ideas and reactions [2]
What neural functions are at
work that support these studies? What is going on in the brain to substantiate
the fact that people are most productive in collaborative settings when they
are working under conditions of trust, in relatively close proximity, feel
validated, and contributing often?
The emotional person and cognition
Underlying all this is the
emotional person, the one that formulates an opinion about the human stimuli they
incur daily. In social settings the key stimulus is the actual face-to-face
encounters with other human beings along with words and gestures. The
productive sessions are a result of the trust the members have achieved in
their time together. It is likely they are not experiencing too much sadness,
fear, anxiety, or anger but instead joy in that they are willing contributors
and in close proximity with friends.
Consider, too, that these
successful encounters in social venues, work, and school are pleasurable. Humans
seek pleasure and remain motivated to perform tasks knowing that there will be
a reward upon completion. The reward may not be immediate but knowledge of the
fact that there will be a reward often keeps an individual on task and
cooperative. [3]
In their 2012 book The Emotional Life of the Brain,
Richard Davidson and Sharon Begley examine research that connects the emotion
existence of a person with their cognition. In simplest terms they discuss the
ever present interplay between how we feel, the thoughts we generate, and our
drives in life. A significant theme in their book relates how the prefrontal
cortex interacts with the emotion-registering midbrain to give significance or
relevance to the myriad of stimuli that bombards our being daily.
Six emotional styles
Davidson and Begley present
six emotional style dimensions that in their judgment reflect the discoveries
of modern neuroscientific research. They are
Resilience:
how slowly or quickly you recover from adversity
Outlook: how
long you are able to sustain positive emotion
Social intuition: how adept you are at picking up social signals from the people around
you
Self-awareness:
how well you perceive bodily feelings that reflect emotions
Sensitivity to context: how good you are at regulating your emotional
responses to take into account the context you find yourself in
Attention:
how sharp and clear your focus is [4]
The conclusions Csikszentmihaly/Hunter
and Pentland derived call attention to successful interactions that result in
heightened cognition, happiness, and task productivity. The six styles from
Davidson and Begley would be the emotional backdrop to these conclusions. The
text also has a questionnaire to assess your level of emotional style for each
of the categories and goes to great lengths explaining how the categories
function within the brain's thinking and emotional sectors. It is beyond the
scope of this blog post to recapitulate all of the brain connections relative
to the six styles but it is nevertheless helpful to discuss some important
facets.
The frontal cortex and amygdala
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Pentland in his book Honest Signals (MIT Press, 2008, p. 18)
mentions that most conversations have an element of competition because they
are biologically expensive as one strives to get their words in while listening
to others. He cites that people that have gone through a series of interviews,
for instance, find the process exhausting due to the continued concentration
and interaction.
I would add that the prospect
of having to experience a job or college interview can produce fear in many.
The amygdala will register this fear as the individual has to face the social
situation, and will send signals to other parts of the brain to start the fight
or fight mechanism. The person will perhaps experience sweaty palms and a dry
mouth as a reaction.
Davidson and Begley point out
that the left side of the prefrontal cortex can send signals to quiet down the
amygdala and shorten the period of its activation and dampen the fear emotion. The
fear during the initial encounter for many people that join a work team in
business or school is real given the novelty of this social situation.
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encourages participation, along with positive feedback of member interjections, the new member's memory will register the process as rewarding. ("Hey….these people respect my opinion and want me to be part of the group"). Subsequent meetings will likely have the left prefrontal cortex reduce the amygdalar activation for fear in this social realm.
Therefore, how does
productive collaborative work associated with the prefrontal cortex-amygdala
connection generate dopamine? It works at two fronts. One is knowledge that
task completion will be rewarding. This happens due to the reinforcement by the
members of your team accepting you in the group and the realization that your
contributions are meaningful to the group's effort to compete the task.
Second is that you find
performing with your group to be pleasurable. You are motivated not only to be
there but look forward to thinking deeply about the task and making the
contributions with these people. You want more of this experience. You have a trusting relationship with them.
The group effort is maximized
by the spatial proximity where members experience up close face-to-face
acknowledgement with gestures such as nodding, smiling, verbalization (“nice
going”, “that helped”, “yeah, yeah, yeah”). It is a positive human social experience.
The Resilience emotional style
These kinds of interpersonal experiences
in schools can go a long way to not only facilitate assimilation of content
areas but also nurture tolerance. Sitting in lectures day after day will not
accomplish this. The human brain is primed to be socially active and teachers
that design purposeful collaborative assignments that take advantage of the way
the prefrontal cortex coordinates a dopamine rush are making a significant
impact on the lives of children.
Davidson and Begley point out
that the prefrontal cortex's ability to quiet the signals from the amygdala
“enables the brain to plan and act effectively without being distracted by
negative emotions”, a working definition of Resilience.
The Social Intuition emotional style
Furthermore, eye contact
plays a big role in the Socially
Intuitive Brain. They found that there was considerable amygdalar
activation when autistic children are asked to examine faces in pictures to
ascertain the emotions conveyed. In fact they repeatedly avoided gazing at the
eyes of the pictured subjects and the fear generated by the amygdala consequently
decreased. In other words these autistic children reduced anxiety by avoiding
eye contact. They lacked the social intuition of normal children, that is, the
ability to discern social signals and subtle cues from people through eye
contact without being in a fearful state.
Recent studies have shown
that the diminishment of the fear response in the amygdala is due to a
connection to the fusiform gyrus part of the brain. People that have developed
a good social intuition have higher activation in the fusiform gyrus region and
lowered activation in the amygdala. The actual chemical that reduces amygdalar
activity is oxytocin, a hormone. Humans have more brain receptors for that
molecule which is associated with maternal behavior, romantic attachment, and
feelings of calm and contentment.
Successful collaborative
learning would probably promote good social intuition in the members, and part
of that intuition is likely to be derived from the eye contact and the
associated positive gesturing performed during sessions. Repetition of
collaborative learning sessions is likely to reinforce the individual's overall
social intuition because it stimulates the mechanism that secretes oxytocin in
the brain, reduces the amygdala's fear reaction, and stimulates the fusiform
gyrus to generate the social intuition that makes conversations and group
dynamics work.
The Sensitivity to Context emotional style
There have been instances
when a student enrolls into a new school well into the semester. In some cases it
is a big adjustment and the young person appears somewhat nervous in their new
surroundings. They are looking around to see if they are going to the correct
room and seem a little lost as they check their schedule sheet and clumsily hold
their books. They come late to classes and sit in a seat not assigned to them
and get stares from the veteran students. That is understandable because she
had a context associated with a former building, but now has a new schedule and
strange people around her. Everything is unfamiliar. That contextual change can produce anxiety. Some
people handle these situations better than others.
The hippocampus is the region
that helps people distinguish between a familiar and unfamiliar context. It is
mainly known as a memory storage area in the brain but also a regulator of
behavior inhibition based on environmental context. People with post-traumatic
stress syndrome, for instance, will react inappropriately when a context is not
differentiated such as a soldier returning from combat falls to the ground upon
hearing the bang of a garbage can in a street in the US. In this case, the
amygdala and adrenal response, so very appropriate in the war zone, does not
differentiate even in a peaceful setting back in the States. His brain has not
been able to put both sounds (artillery or garbage can) in their context to
distinguish a response.
People who do not have a
well-developed sensitivity to context have smaller hippocampi in the area near
the amygdala. The problem, too, is that sensitivity to context can also be in
the other extreme: tuned out. In either case it seems that the prefrontal cortex
again is important and this time with the hippocampus, which stores memories of
contexts. The hippocampus is also involved in long-term memory processing with
the brain's cortex and the strengthening of the connections between the two
will lead to a balance in sensitivity to context, rather than excessively
tuned-in and tuned-out. [5]
That new student may benefit
from the banter, eye contact, and participation with her collaborative group if
the teacher uses that pedagogy. She will have a context to relate and could
transfer that context to new situations such as other classes or even moving to
another school. Productive collaborative learning builds confidence and young
people need the ability to size up contexts for successful living in order to
manage themselves in new and varied social environments.
The Outlook emotional style
Outlook, how
long you are able to sustain positive emotion, has been studied to compare
normal and clinically depressed people. Davidson mentions this cycle of events:
that in anticipation of a reward the prefrontal
cortex will want to sustain the good feeling, stimulates the production of
dopamine, the nucleus accumbens becoming more active, and the good-feeling
effect associated with endorphins (runners high) kicks in. When Davidson played
feel-good movie clips (“children playing, adults dancing, and people eating
food”) in his lab, healthy individuals would sustain the endorphin high for
long periods after viewing. It is as if the mind is saying “keep going…I like
this feeling.” This is where the dopamine continues to touch base with receptors
on the nucleus accumbens, and keeps working even after the feel-good movies stop.
These people have therefore a positive outlook.
Depressed individuals get the
high during the video presentation but the effect peters out a few minutes
after it is over. Davidson feels that the signal “transmitted from the
prefrontal cortex gets lost or dribbles out like a leaky faucet.” The reward
circuity does not work very well in depressed people and they are likely to
have a negative outlook.
In the collaborative setting
not only is the mind saying to itself:
“keep going…I like this feeling,” but the other members are doing
likewise out loud. That human reinforcement adds to the reward circuitry. It
follows that such a barrage of encouragement will help the members to have the
sustained endorphin good feeling not just during the collaborative task but
afterwards. It is a Sensitivity of Context that every child should get from
school.
The Attention emotional style
The Attention style is related to the ability of the brain to sustain
focus on stimuli. When it is working best we can selectively pay attention to
signals from the external environment without allowing the many extraneous
thoughts and feelings to pop into our focus and distract us. This means you can
take a quiz with the door open, even though there are distractions in the
hallway. It means successfully driving home on a crowded expressway, including
lane changes and the movements of others, during a rainstorm.
Studies have shown that it is
the prefrontal cortex that is selectively working here to maintain the focus.
Doing tasks such as crosswords puzzles, reading slowly and carefully (including
annotating), or playing chess is selective focus. Consider the benefits of the
listening and contributing that the prefrontal cortex experiences during a
successful collaborative sessions. There is no time to be unfocused or
daydreaming in such a configuration like you would if the teacher were
lecturing the entire period.
Davidson and Begley conclude:
Emotions work with cognition in an integrated and
seamless way to navigate the world of relationships, work, and spiritual
growth. When the positive emotions
energizes us, we are better able to concentrate, to figure out the social
networks and a new job or school, to broaden our thinking so we can creatively
integrate diverse information, and to sustain our interest in a task so we can
persevere. [4]
References
[1] Csikszentmihalyi, M., Hunter, J., 'Happiness in Everyday Life: The Uses of Experience Sampling', Journal of Clinical
Psychology, p. 185-199, 2003
[2] Pentland, A., Social Physics: How Good Ideas
Spread-The Lessons from a New Science, Penguin Press, 2014
[3] Snyder, C. R.; Lopez, Shane J. (2007). Positive Psychology. Sage Publications, Inc. p. 147.
[4] Davidson, R., Begley, S., The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live – and
How You Can Change Them, Plume, 2012
[5] Sapolsky, R., Depression, antidepressants, and the shrinking hippocampus, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States of America, 2001 Oct 23; 98(22): 12320–12322.
